January is nearly over and I have to say I’m feeling much better. Less of my time is spent sleeping, coughing, blowing my nose, and feeling like death. This past week was the first time I drove and left the house at all since December. It’s been a battle, but I’m doing better than I expected I would a couple weeks ago and that’s something.
As I’m emerging from my sickness shell though, I’ve noticed some new… things.
One. My sleep patterns are an eternal mess. Before all of this sickness, I was getting a solid 8-9 hours of sleep a night. It wasn’t ideal going to bed at 2am, but at least I was on a routine. When I was working out regularly back in the summer, I slept deep and stayed asleep all through the night. Now, since I’ve been sick and off my workout schedule, everything’s royally jacked up. I’m lucky if I’m in bed asleep by 4am. And then I get annoyed because I have to sleep so late that I can’t just sleep in if I’m feeling extra tired. I feel rushed for the rest of the day and off balance. If by some miracle, I’m in bed earlier (like say, 1am or midnight) it’s nearly impossible to stay asleep. After about 4 hours, I’m barely awake but my brain is running and raring to go. It’s annoying. What’s more pressing to me though is the fact that I feel I’ve been fighting this battle for most of my life. All it takes is one late night or a few tiny ounces of caffeine and I’m all off balance again – going to bed at 3am, waking up at noon, dragging through the day. I feel as though I’m fighting my body’s natural tendency to be a night owl. In a perfect world, that wouldn’t be an issue. But let’s be real, most places don’t operate on night owl hours. If I want to be gainfully employed someday, I’m going to need to adjust my body. I’m just finding that’s insanely difficult.
Two. My father has become a pretty wonderful dad. When I was younger, he wasn’t always perfect and was often lost on how to raise a girl by himself. He had horrible taste in women and the abuse I suffered was often at the hands of those wretched stepmothers. He’s certainly a bigger perfectionist than I and has passed that lovely trait on to me. He’s still not a touchy-feely kind of dad and we’ll never have a big talk about our feelings, I’m sure. But as he gets older, he seems to soften a bit more. He says “I love you” and “I miss you” more than he ever did when I was younger. And he’s learning to accept me for who I am rather than who he wanted me to be as a child. When I was really sick this month, he called every single day. Just a five minute phone call to check in and see if I sounded better. Sometimes my throat was so sore I couldn’t talk, but he still called and he was concerned every time. He was three hours away and working non-stop and you could tell he just wanted to come and see me, but couldn’t. My mother? Well, I spent three weeks in bed and she called only once – to ask if I would watch her dog while she went out with some friends. Then, after my father ripped her a new one for being five minutes away and not stopping by to check on me, she finally stopped by. The whole time I sat on the couch, exhausted and sick, and all she did was complain about her friends, the drama in her life, the fact that I had a trashcan full of used tissues in the living room. Then when she let the damn dogs go running out the front door, she yelled at me for not running out into the cold to help her corral them. All while I was so dizzy I couldn’t walk and coughing my brains out. Every time she has to somehow think of other people or take care of me for a change, you can actually see her discomfort. Jeff can attest to this. She sits on our couch, visibly impatient, checking her watch, dying to leave and get away from any sort of responsibilities she might have as a mother. I’m aware my mother is an addict and probably always will be. But the older I get, the more I realize she’s also just an incredibly selfish person with really fucked up priorities. When I was a young girl, I used to think it was horrible that I had to live with my dad and evil stepmothers and couldn’t go live with my mom. But now, I just think it was an incredible blessing that I ended up where I did and I’m glad. My mom could barely hold it together during the occasional weekend visit, but I couldn’t see that then. Could you imagine if I had lived with her?
Three. Veterinarians. Life sort of pushed that goal away for a bit recently. But then I realized I had to start being honest with myself. Every time I imagine getting into vet school or becoming a veterinarian, I am filled with excitement. But then I am also filled with exhaustion. I keep telling myself “that’s just fear and uncertainty. This is your dream!” But then something in me keeps pushing it away and I can’t really explain it. While I was sick, I had a lot of time to lay in bed and think about things. And every time I imagined myself being a vet and living the daily vet life, I was both exhilarated and fearful, but then I was exhausted too, like I had somehow pushed myself into something that wasn’t the best path for me. And then every time I imagined myself pursuing some other non-veterinary path – whether it was animal photography, animal behavior, animal-somethingorother – a weight would lift and I would feel all that uncertainty fade. It didn’t clarify anything for me, but that sense of “right-ness” was very real. And it’s all left me wondering – am I really pursuing something I shouldn’t be? Or was there a reason I never became a vet in the first place? Am I meant for something else? I keep trying to listen to that inner voice a lot more now. Where is it guiding me? Where is it telling me to go? When I first began this possibility of becoming a vet, I prayed so much. I’m not even a religious person, but I prayed to anyone that was listening and I remember asking: If this is wrong for me, if I’m going down the wrong path, please give me the courage to accept that, be honest with myself, and let it go. I don’t believe veterinarian is off the table at all yet (it’s still my dream, just not the only one). But I have to be honest with myself. I pushed myself into a psychology degree when it was so obvious I was meant for art – and I struggled endlessly and regretted every minute of it. I don’t want to do that again. So I’m just going to keep wading into new things and listening to my inner voice, the one that often knows more than me. I haven’t done that a lot in my life and I think it’s time I learn to speak to my gut again. I’m not giving up on my dreams – not by a long shot – but I am going to open a dialogue with the universe again. There’s no point in asking for guidance if I can’t also be trusted with “no” for an answer.
So that’s where I’m at in my thinking lately. You can see that being sick sometimes has its advantages. You feel like death, but you are forced to rest and come to terms with the fact that you are not a superhero. Doing everything is a wonderful goal, but not at all realistic. As my lungs continue to heal, hopefully I will learn to listen to my body, the universe, and my gut a little more than I have been. We can only hope, right?
